How about a blistering, tormented romance between the Titanic's Kate Winslet and the anti-Leonardo Di Caprio, Harvey Keitel? It sounds a bit strange, and so it turns out in Jane Campion's Holy Smoke, presented at Venice as one of the big events of this year's festival. The film, however, carries more reminders of Campion's small-scale Sweetie, booed at Cannes a few years back but now more happily remembered, than lusher efforts such as The Piano and Portrait of Lady.

Co-scripted by Jane's sister Anna, the film has Winslet as a young Australian hoiked back from India by her family on the pretence that her father is terminally ill. In fact, they're worried that she has fallen under the spell of a dangerous guru and needs saving from him and herself. When she returns, she is faced with Keitel as a middle-aged "exit counsellor", hired to persuade her of the error of her ways. He has succeeded a thousand times before, but this time he's faced with an avenging angel as powerfully committed to the truth as he is.

The film is beautifully shot in India and Australia, and discusses, not without humour, the nature of belief and the hypocrisy of the world. We are led to feel that however much absurdity the guru has generated, it is no more foolish than the stifling orthodoxy which her ludicrous suburban family proffers as an alternative. Meanwhile, Keitel's unreconstructed 70s sexual vanity allows him to fall hopelessly in love with Winslet's questing if uncertain 90s youth.

All these questions about how we live our lives could have made for a dull and pretentious film. But the picture is not that. It is, however, uneven enough to make us wonder whether its canvas is too large, or whether its determination to be funny and eccentric as well as forceful eventually makes it shallower than it ought to be.

Gravely as Winslet and Keitel try, they seem less credible as characters than as symbols. If Sweetie's eccentricities, which so up-ended its first audiences at Cannes, still seemed to be intensely believable, Holy Smoke's postmodern approach somehow leaves the real truth a little way behind.

It's a film of some ambition which stumbles a little on its themes. But at least it tries to engage our intelligence and curiosity as Campion's films invariably do.

Another eagerly-awaited film was Abbas Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us which, since the Iranian director has already won the Palme D'Or at Cannes and a host of other awards, looked likely to attract the attention of the jury, headed by the Serbian director Emir Kusturica, an ardent admirer of Kiarostami.

One of the most beautiful films he has produced, it is also immaculately made. The content, however, is a problem since this time Kiarostami asks us to invent part of the story ourselves.

The film has a group of electricians from the city travelling to a remote village. Are they there to install a new telephone system or to steal artefacts from the local cemetery? We never know, but Kiarostami paints a sympathetic picture of the locals, suggesting that outsiders must respect their way of life before interfering with it.

There are some lovely moments, such as when an old lady at the tea shop castigates her customers for idleness as they are argue back at her. But this is not another Close Up, it is more a typical example of a director honing his art still further towards the kind of simplicity that masks complex ideas.